Public Lands

A New Era for Protecting Public Lands

The Bureau of Land Management has always prioritized extraction activities. Now the agency has announced a rule that could elevate conservation.

In August, 2021, I blogged on Legal Planet about a piece in Science I had co-authored arguing for an end to prohibiting “nonuse” rights to bid on public land use. The article helped popularize the issue and the Bureau of Land Management today announced a final rule that, as the BLM press release describes, “recognizes …

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Will the NEPA Amendments Speed Up Permitting?

Probably not much. If at all.

I’ve blogged quite a bit about the challenges of interpreting the NEPA amendments, which snuck through as part of last year’s debt ceiling bill.  I haven’t said much about their impact.  Given the amount of energy infrastructure we need to build in the near future, a streamlined permitting process would be great. Alas, I don’t …

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Deciphering NEPA 2.0

Here’s everything you wanted to know about the “New NEPA” but were afraid to ask.

NEPA was long an island of legal stability, standing almost unamended for over a half century.  Then in the summer of 2023, everything changed.  As a rider on the agreement to raise the debt ceiling, Congress extensively rewrote and expanded NEPA, gifting us with a new statutory regime.  As I’ve written before — and discuss …

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Inequality Today: Unfinished Work

The first step in addressing the problem is to be clear about the facts.

More than a half century after Martin Luther King’s death, his work is still unfinished.  Sadly, despite his efforts and those of many others, inequality remains a reality along multiple, interrelated dimensions: race, income, and geography.   Inequality is not merely economic; it involves differences in health and life expectancy — and in exposure to pollution …

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Who the Heck is Patrick McHenry?

And what does he think about the environment?

Patrick McHenry has been Speaker pro tem with limited powers, but there’s talk about trying to bump him up, giving him full power as Speaker for a limited time so the House can get back to work. That might be just a flash in the pan, but he turns out to be interesting enough to …

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The NEPA Amendments in Nine Blog Posts

Surveying the legal problems of the biggest NEPA changes in the past fifty years.

On June 5, President Biden signed the debt ceiling bill, which provides the first significant rewrite of NEPA since it was passed over fifty years ago.  In a series of blog posts, I’ve explored some of the legal issues raised by the amendments. My goal has been highlighting problem areas rather than providing anything like …

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Nature and the Pursuit of Happiness

The original understanding of an inalienable right.

What is the “pursuit of happiness,” which the Declaration of Independence says is an inalienable right? It sounds like this is about  freedom from governmental restrictions on your activities.  So, in modern terms, it seemed to mean that the government can’t stop you from “doing your own thing.” But that can’t be right. The Declaration …

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NEPA 2.0 and Transmission Projects

Will the new NEPA provisions speed approval of urgently needed projects?

In terms of the energy transition, the most important question about the recent NEPA amendments is whether they streamline permitting for transmission projects. The answer is complicated. We can divide transmission projects into two groups. The first group consists of transmission projects where federal involvement is limited to specific segments, such as stream crossings requiring …

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Having the Fox Guard the Henhouse?

Delegating Environmental Reviews to Project Sponsors

One of the most important provisions, of the new NEPA law, § 107(f), allows the lead agency to delegate preparation of environmental reviews to project applicants. There are unsettled questions about when this provision applies and how it interfaces with other parts of NEPA. There are clear conflicts of interest in assigning this role to …

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Centralizing Environmental Reviews under NEPA’s New Section 107

Sec. 107 is the key permitting reform applying to major projects. Will it work?

The 2023 Amendments to NEPA tweak current regulations in various ways in the name of permitting reform. Those changes make it easier to exempt smaller projects or cover them with programmatic impacts statements.  The key issue, however, is going to be the effectiveness of new section 107, the main provision aimed at large-scale projects like …

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